POV: Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World

The twentieth century was bloody, with two world wars and dictatorships arising around the globe. In Russia, Germany, China, Cambodia and elsewhere, individuals numbering in the millions were systematically murdered. What is the deepest cause of this warfare and destruction?

In a sweeping 1960 talk, “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World” (reprinted in Philosophy: Who Needs It), Ayn Rand locates the cause in mankind’s embrace of mysticism and altruism. Only when we learn to reject faith in the name of reason and self-sacrifice in the name of a new morality of self-interest, will freedom and peaceful co-existence be possible.

This is the perspective from which ARI approaches every issue of foreign policy. We advocate reason, self-interest and the freedom of laissez-faire capitalism; as a consequence, we uphold a foreign policy of genuine free trade and the moral right of a free nation to use retaliatory force in self-defense.